How To Reduce Bounce Rate Of WordPress Website?
16 min read
Bounce Rate On WordPress Website?
Bounce rate is considered that by large numbers of people to be a crucial search engine ranking factor, which tells Google an awful lot about the WordPress website’s overall quality. Keep a low bounce rate and that’s one of the ways Google will view your website with respect. Maintain a high bounce rate, however, and you may be able to see your ranking drop on search engine results (SERPs). If you have a high bounce rate, it is a sign that you’re facing more issues than ranking to be concerned about. We’ll discuss some suggestions and tricks with you today to keep your visitors to your website!
What is Bounce Rate?
Before we look at ways to lower bounce rates it is important to know the method of calculation. Based on Google the definition of bounces within Google Analytics will be recorded whenever an event occurs on your website like when a user visits one page, and then quickly exits, without prompting further requests within the session. The bounce rate is simply one-page session divided by the total sessions. This from a number of different sources. It is then figured out as a percentage of sessions on your website that only saw one page on your website.
What Is A Great Bounce Rate?
According to research bounce rates can differ quite a bit based on the type of site or the industry. For instance, typical bounce rates for an eCommerce website could be between 20 and 45 percent, while the bounce rate for an online landing page could have at or above 90 percent! Keep in mind that the lower number is better. Blog posts typically have higher bounce rates because people read content and, if they aren’t able to discover what they are looking for then they’ll leave.
Average Bounce Rate By website Type
Some have even suggested that the adjustable bounce percentage is superior. This is a bit different from Google’s default method, as you can set a limit on the time at which you are able to consider a user as “engaged.” Following the specified time, the user will not count as bounce. In order to implement this, you will need to alter your Google Analytics script or utilize a free application like CAOS. We don’t have time to go down that rabbit hole right now.
How to Determine The Bounce Rate?
Bounce rate appears in the data in your Google Analytics account. There are a lot of places where you can check the bounce rate, which is basically an information point that can link to any other information. Some common areas you can look at are:
Behavior > Pages All > Bounce Rate (see what pages are having a higher or lower bounce rates)
Acquisition > Channels > Bounce Rate (see what kind of user has the highest bounce)
Acquisition, Source/Medium and Bounce Rate (see which mediums and referral traffic have the highest bounce rate)
Acquisition AdWords > Campaigns > Bounce rate (see the way your AdWords campaign performs in terms of bounce rate)
The bounce rate of Google Analytics
How To Control Bounce Rate?
Here are practical suggestions we’ve put together (an amount of which are based on the tests we’ve conducted on our site) tips to decrease bounce rate and improve the engagement of your visitors on your website.
Methods To Reduce Website Bounce Rate
Optimize Your Content and Traffic First
Before you can optimize your blog to decrease your bounce, you need to first improve your content and traffic. This is the way to go: the visitors you bring to your site should be interested in the content you have to offer. Therefore, if you blog regarding WordPress and your efforts to drive traffic to bring in visitors who would be interested to or interested in Drupal and Joomla and Joomla, your bounce rate will not diminish regardless of how many of these suggestions you apply, because your visitors couldn’t ignore it.
But, it’s pretty general in terms of the readership on our website. Why? Because our visitors and customers are people and companies who are interested in WordPress. We also provide WordPress specific advice. Therefore, we changed the title to include:
What is this doing? It can help to improve the quality of traffic that comes through Google (SERPs). Searchers will see that this article is a bounce rate intended for WordPress users and not for everyone. This may reduce the total amount of visitors, but it can improve the quality of traffic. This will in turn reduce the rate of bounce. An easy change that is made across all your content can result in massive ripple effects.
SEO title in the SERPs
Another way to improve traffic is to determine within Google Analytics which traffic sources are already bringing you highly engaged visitors (lowest bounce rate and most number of pageviews per visit, as well as average. duration of visits) and then capitalize from that data. Contact the sources you have identified and ask them to publish your article or work together with you on your article. That is, take advantage of information that you already own.
Avoid Popups
There’s a lot of discussion in the blogging world on whether popups can be detrimental or beneficial to your website. There are certainly benefits for pop-ups, including:
Higher opt-in rates. David Risley of Blog Marketing Academy has seen a 250 percent increase in the rate of opt-in to his mailing list with Popup Domination. Popup Domination plug-in.
The ability to emphasize something specific to your audience in general (a coming webinar, for instance).).
They can be detrimental to the user experience overall of a site. This is probably the case. Marketers aren’t using these tools for striving to improve user experience. They may also be creating an increase in blindness to banners.
Popups can significantly reduce the bounce rates of your website. The speed at which they occur will also depend on the kind of pop-up like a smaller one or one that is full-screen. It could also be a setting for instance, how many times you show it to users who are new.
When one of your top goals is to reduce your bounce rate, you’ll probably be avoiding pop-ups. The most important thing to avoid is to blindly remove any popups you’ve created within your WordPress website without tracking the outcomes. Consider the benefits with regards to higher engagement and lower opt-ins. Then, you can decide if it’s worth enabling or disable.
It’s clear that here at Kinsta we do not use pop-ups however, we have made that decision after weighing the benefits and drawbacks of allowing one. We do however, use similar things, but it’s more discreet to users. We employ what’s known as an opt-in fly-in. This is achieved using Bloom, the Bloom plug-in of Elegant Themes. It is configured to only display on our blog as well as KB blog posts and only when the user has scrolled at least 50% to the bottom of the screen. This is a good middle place.
Create a User Experience that is crafted with Specific Menus
Your WordPress menu is known as the navigation, and for reason. It’s the most common way for your visitors to navigate through your website. If they aren’t able to find the answers quickly, they may leave. Many webmasters do not think about their navigation very much and simply create the pages they believe should be on the page including about services, contact information blog. page, etc. It is crucial to determine the menu items (both footer and top navigation) are actually utilized and used by your customers.
Make Use of White Space
“White Space” The “white space” phenomenon is everywhere nowadays with a dramatic growth in the creation of minimalist WordPress themes. White space is essentially empty space on your site. There’s nothing thereThere’s no widget there’s no footer, there’s no blog content, only your website’s background.
If you’ve not yet jumped onto the white space train and your website’s layout is stuffed with a variety of boxes or bars and links and bars, you may be seriously affecting you bounce rate. White space allows your visitors their eyes to unwind. It can also allows them to focus at your content that is important as well as CTAs.
The best instance of a company that uses white space for their benefit is Google. They would like users to do one thing (search) and nothing else should hinder them from doing that.
Make sure the fonts aren’t Small
If there’s a thing that everyone dislike, it’s the sight of their eyes to read your website. It’s unlikely that people will alter their gaze just so that they can read the blog posts (no matter how great it’s). Instead, they’ll end up bouncing. Your font should be read.
It’s time to make it big. This is usually where the market has been going. 14 pixels should be considered at a minimum. We go far on the Kinsta blog and we use 18 pixels as our size of font. Other sites that have great designs, like Stripe and others, have the font size 17 pixels. And , as you will see, it’s simple to read.
Size of the font Stripe
A simple method to alter the size of your body’s font is by dropping this code into the CSS section of the WordPress Customizer.
body{
font-size: 18px;
}
Be sure to read our comprehensive guide on ways to alter the font or optimize web fonts.
Include Related Posts To Your Website
It will always be an excellent thing! Maybe the article they came across on was not exactly the content they’re looking to find or they’d like to know more. Therefore, you should try to maintain them on your website by putting them in the context of other content that is related to it. This is usually done at the close of your blog posts.
There’s a huge problem in this, however it is that the majority of WordPress related plugins for posts aren’t great in terms of performance. In reality, they could be quite bad. It’s usually because of large-scale website-wide queries to the database. Speed, which we’ll explore later, can also affect bounce rates.
The Yoast team Yoast did a deep dive into this specific subject and here’s what they have to say:
Let me begin by asking a simple question for a page of content What is the fastest way to implement related posts that you can imagine? The (somewhat boring) answer is simple, old-fashioned links.
And we’re totally in agreement! If you scroll down to the bottom in this post’s blog, you’ll find that we’ve included what we refer to as “hand-picked” relevant articles. They’re actually picked by us by hand and then added to the article. This reduces the question to almost nothing, and won’t affect speed of performance for the whole website. Do you need to do more effort? Sure, however it may actually be better than it is because you choose what you would like readers to read about.
How did we do it? The answer, unfortunately, will be a topic for a different post that is scheduled to be published soon. Be sure to sign up to our newsletter to ensure that you do not miss out on it. We’re able to tell you that we utilized to use the Advanced Custom Fields plugin, and then added those fields for our blog post types. This lets us search for and assign any related content we’d like to be included in each blog post (as as shown below). We’ll soon publish a complete guide on how to create this setup for your self.
Customize Your 404 Error Page
A 404 error page is a page that appears when a user clicks an inactive hyperlink to your siteone that isn’t yet populated with information on it, and thus triggers an “404” error. A page that is the default WordPress 404 message reads the following:
OOPS! The page can’t be found. It seems like there was nothing found at this address. Perhaps try searching?
Based on the theme you’re using, it may also provide web pages author, categories post, posts and posts according to month. It’s not all that useful as it gives lots of information, instead of providing the confused user a straightforward, simple step to follow. The aim of an page with 404 is to avoid an unintentional bounce and give them the information they’re searching for.
At Kinsta We try to come up with a unique idea with our 404 picture and still provide users with valuable details. We notify them that the page is not available and they are able to go directly to our main site, or search using the search box below. We also show the most recent blog posts as well as an avenue to contact us for any additional assistance.
404 Error Page
To modify your page’s 404, you are able to make or edit the themes 404.php pages. A majority of them come with pre-built templates. Use a free WordPress plugin like 404page, that lets you easily modify it without needing to be able to code.
Fix Grammar Errors
It is a good idea to keep reviewing your blog post for spelling, grammar errors, typos, as well as spelling mistakes at least twice before clicking the publish button.
If someone spots a typo on your website and then calls your site out, do not be frightened immediately fix it now. (And do not forget to delete the cache of the webpage on your WordPress website following the incident. This is crucial in the event that you’re advertising your content via social media sites, since there’s the potential for lots of people who are interested in the page.)
Make use of a browser extension, such as Grammarly. As avid writers, we make use of this incredible tool at Kinsta. Why? It will aid in catching things that you would otherwise overlook. It will help speed the process of writing. It will speed up your writing workflow. Hemingway App is also an excellent free grammar-checking tool!
Start External Links From New Tabs or Windows
Linking to other sites is fantastic as it helps you establish connections with them, establish connections, and also provide better content for your audience. Linking to quality external sources could be beneficial to SEO. But it also diverts users away from your website. If you do not have the links open in an entirely new window or tab.
It can be a controversial issue for some, and there are certainly solid arguments for the reasons why it isn’t a good idea to have links open in new tabs. As the owner of the site, it is up to you to decide what method you prefer. At Kinsta We do have hyperlinks that open within new tabs. This decreases the bounce rate of our site and keeps our visitors focused on our site for longer.
If you want your links to open in a different tab, simply select “Open link in the New tab” when you add your destination URL into your WordPress editor (as you can see below).
Open Link In New Tab
To accomplish this manually using”Text,” to do it manually in “Text” view You can add “target=”_blank” in the hyperlink.
Example: target=”_blank”>external site resource
The Internal Link is Most of the time
Internal linking is not only an excellent SEO technique however it can aid in reducing bounce rates on your website in a significant way. For those who aren’t aware internal linking is linking from one website on your site to another. It is directing visitors to a different site so that they can explore after the first pageview.
The internal link in your blog contains phrases that are featured in your blog posts that are relevant to the headline of a different post. The easiest way to do this is to simply search through your content before creating an external link. As an example, below, we looked up SEO and internal linked our SEO checklist. Of course, you can always connect internally using HTML too.
Internal link within WordPress Website
But, as with everything, internal link in moderation do not try to link irrelevant words to the point of adding additional links. Too many links could have be detrimental to your bounce rate as well as search engine optimization.
Be Cross-Browser Compatible
If you’ve got a preferred browser does not mean that your friends are using the same version. It’s why it’s essential to make sure you are checking. Certain designs on websites can appear somewhat odd when using less popular browsers like Internet Explorer. If there’s a problem with your website, you may be getting easily avoided bounces.
But, it’s equally crucial to consider the length of your development process and the size of an audience is in relation to a specific browser issue. Let’s take an example: that your WordPress website receives one million people every month. If you have a problem in IE 8 rendering something incorrectly and you’re aware it will take a considerable amount of development time to fixit, you may be better off doing other things. At certain points, you have to allow old browsers to go to sleep.
Make your decision based on facts! It is easy to look up Google Analytics under the “Audience – Technology – Browser and OS” report and find out the number of visitors coming from each browser, and their particular version.
Are you having trouble with slowdowns and WordPress issues? Kinsta is the solution for hosting created to make your life easier! Take a look at our options
Mobile is Everything
Here are some frightening statistics for you, particularly those who haven’t yet made your WordPress website in mobile-friendly devices.
At the end of the fourth quarter of 2017, 57% of all traffic on the internet comes from mobile devices. This is an increase from 15 percent in 2013.
Google states that 61 percent of users are not likely to revisit the mobile website they had difficulty accessing, and 40% will visit the site of a competitor instead. (MicKinsey & Company)
That’s huge! The majority of your traffic could be getting lost because they’re not able to navigate properly on your site. Happily, the majority of WordPress themes are now responsive right out of the box. However, you must check this yourself. We suggest making use of the Mobile-Friendly testing tool from Google. This will help assure you that your website is secure to use search engine indexing that is mobile-first (SEO).
If you’re stuck then you could also consider using the WordPress plugin. This will ensure that your website is mobile and tablet friendly. We always suggest using the responsive option first. Responsive simply means that your WordPress site automatically scales down on all devices that have code and there is no plugin. It is also possible to employ an WordPress designer to help you with making your website adaptable.
Create Your Content Using Care
There are many ways to arrange your content effectively to reduce bounce rates. The first is to utilize subheadings and headings for your blog posts. Blog posts, especially lengthy, deep posts like this one contain a great deal of details. Each piece of information requires some kind of structure be digested, otherwise it’s going to be extremely difficult for users to process the entire content, which can trigger an unintentional bounce.
The structure of your blog posts by using the headings (H2) along with subheadings (H3 H4, H4, as well as H5). In this blog post, we’re making use of a mix with H2 headings as well as H3 headings. Always include the H1 headline on the front of your page.
Headings H1 and H2
After you’ve got your headings written down, you must remember that you also utilize smaller paragraphs. This isn’t high-school English in which paragraphs were required to be at least five sentences. It’s blogging which means that paragraphs with more than five sentences may occasionally be overlooked.
If you would like viewers to take the time to readyour content, and not simply read it and skim through it, you must break up your content into smaller paragraphs. Four sentences is the standard length. Some bloggers go to as little as two sentences. It can also differ depending on the kind of content you are publishing.
Images Tell All
It’s probably not necessary to elaborate on this topic too many times however, images are worth a thousand words. Therefore, instead of boring your readers by a 4,000-word essay (hint: content length isn’t the only element) make them feel inspired by images. If you look up in this post, you’ll find that for each bounce rate hack we’ve discussed there’s always an image that shows an illustration.
Are you having difficulty finding images? Take a look at these 10 great sites to get royalty-free photos to use on your website. We’re also huge fans of Iconfinder and actually often use them in the featured photos we post.
Make sure your image is compatible with your layout for content and layout. We recommend making use of full-width images whenever possible which fill the whole content area. This makes it easier for eyes and makes content easily accessible for scans. Don’t be forgetting to optimize your images for greater performance.
Always Use Internal Search
If a user visits your website and isn’t able to find what he’s searching for If you’ve made a mistake. The best solution to redress your site and prevent visitors from getting lost is to introduce the internal search feature on your website. It is probably the last thing a user will do before leaving.
As a default your WordPress installation will include a search widget available. You can install anywhere you want to use a widget. The theme could also have other places built-in to use to search. Whatever you decide to decide to do, don’t ever remove search functions from your website!
Have Lightning-Fast Page Load Speeds
Speed of loading is an extremely important aspect in the bounce rate. The simpler, quicker your site loads the more efficient your bounce percentage will be (if the other variables remain constant). Websites that take more than three minutes to open immediately will lose 40% of their visitors. The majority of unhappy users will not return to sites that load slowly!
To experience lightning-fast speeds, you need a high-end managed WordPress hosting service and that’s the area where Kinsta can be of assistance. Kinsta is operated through the Google Cloud Platform which means your WordPress websites are hosted on one of the largest networks around the globe and are loaded from low-latency data centers that are close to your site’s visitors. We also offer An SSL/HTTP/2 CDN connectivity which lets you accelerate the delivery of your content around the world.
Let us take you through the Kinsta distinction. You can also read more about the reasons we’re different from any other host you’ve ever tried.
Summary
I hope these suggestions for reducing bounce rates on your WordPress website were useful. If you’ve come this far, then we’ve accomplished our part to reduce our bounce rate. Now is your turn. What strategies are you planning to implement for your website this week? Have you noticed other optimizations that have made an enormous impact?
About Author
